God's servant, the clam digger
By Anna McShane — The phone call from the lawyer came just as we were trying to figure out how to raise several thousand dollars to take a TESOL certification course for our ministry in East Asia. A few months before we’d been at the funeral of our dear old friend, Jeanie, and met this man. Now he was calling to tell us that Jeanie had left us a substantial sum of money in her will – twice what we needed for the TESOL course.
The last time I saw Jeanie, she was 92, tall and angular. I found it hard to believe that she was born so tiny a preemie that her dad kept her in a shoe box on the open door of the woodstove oven.
Jeanie was one of many children in a dirt-poor family of clam diggers in a New Jersey tidewater town. A wealthy dentist from the city occasionally came to their town to do charity dentistry. He liked Jeanie and invited her to come and help his wife in their large home just off the beach. One less mouth to feed was a blessing in the height of the Depression.
For some years Jeanie was part maid and part dental assistant. It was in their church, pastored by my father, that she came to Christ and married. Thirty years later, when the dentist died, he left his house to Jeanie and her husband, complete with everything in it. A small fortune.
Jeanie had a servant’s heart. Though one of the least educated in her church, her home became the center of care, fellowship and above all, food. Her dining table often held 20, church leaders sitting alongside widows and orphans.
In all this, Jeanie worked with a severe handicap. She was almost deaf with nerve damage from loud noise when she worked in beach amusement parks as a young married woman. She learned to read lips and have people write down what they wanted to say. In her later years, Jeanie lost most of her sight to macular degeneration.
Seven hundred miles from our home one day, we went to see Jeanie in the rehab center where she was recovering from some heart issues. I walked into the room and said her name, and she leaped out of her wheelchair and called me by name. She wrapped her lanky arms around me and hugged me. I wanted to cry. Instead I sat beside her where she could still make out my shape, held her hand and listened.
Jeanie told me how she prayed for her pastor and his wife, and for all the missionaries she supported. “I just wish I could do more,” she said wistfully. “There’s a new one starting out. I could give a little toward her support.”
Almost all her friends were gone, but Jeanie still wore a smile of glory as the darkness and silence slowly closed in around her.
Six months later she was gone. We “just happened” to be near enough to go to the funeral, mourning her loss, rejoicing in her gain of Glory.
And now the lawyer’s call. The sum he named not only paid for our training, but left enough to give $100 a month for several years to that beginning missionary whom Jeanie had wanted so much to support. The will had been written 40 years earlier, long before either we or Jeanie had any idea where our lives would take us.
God’s servants come in all shapes, sizes, education levels, and personalities. And we, the family of the Spirit, benefit from all those God chooses to call into His work.
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